Very nice low power setup. Running complex stuff too. The Sheeva plug looks a good candidate for a NAS / media server without the pain of big optimisation, and would save me $$$ compared to running PC tower configs to mostly copy files to my box under the TV.

Can't help but think that the main thing holding back BlackBerry in non-users is that it isn't as glitzy and has very little "wow" factor compared to Windows phone 7, iPhone and Android. For personal use - photos, video, checking personal email quickly (but not replying, which is a pain even with predictive text) and surfing casually. Add contacts to Outlook and they're straight on your phone. Email includes a your local addresses and can query the enterprise contact DB. SSH is possible via BlackBerry and can be inside the local network for access to server admin.

BlackBerry is great for email & scheduling, allows you to reply to email comfortably, and the touch version adds some of the other advantages that currently belong to Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Apple was stalling things for a while. Not sure about the whole story on this, what changed, when and how long it took for the IE team to get things done once the legal stuff was sorted out. Here is an original email form apple.

http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-March/010129.html

and some background http://ajaxian.com/archives/microsoft-canvas-and-the-whatwg This is all several years old at this point. But this was an IE history lesson, not current events.

Your right. I should have done fact checking before just writing down my memory. CSS in Microsoft Explorer 3 was the first time me and the majority of the world encountered it. But the standards guys and real inventors had been working on it for almost 2 years.

From wikipedia - Although the CSS1 specification was completed in 1996 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3[8] was released in that year featuring some limited support for CSS, it was more than three years before any web browser achieved near-full implementation of the specification.

IE 1 - 3 Were garbage compared to what Netscape was offering at the time IE 4 was substantially better than Netscape Navigator. With IE 5 crushing it as Netscape imploded.

Microsoft was late to the game but threw everything at it to crush their competition. They had much better technology once they got to IE 4. (They also used other business tactics to run Netscape out of business with OEM agreements and giving away their web servers).

The CSS we complain about - Microsoft invented it. The Browser wars took HTML from a markup that didn't even have tables to close to what we have today. The Standards were a joke. Each browser came up with innovations and then copied their competitors. Standards were an after effect of what web developers adopted (down with Blink). Websites were best with IE or best with Netscape.

Once Microsoft drove Netscape out of business they just sat there and didn't put any effort into it like any Monopoly - there was no reason to.

The Standards bodies created a host of specs CSS 2 and 3 being some of the most important that differed from what Microsoft had in IE. This was different from the rubber stamping of the implementations we had before during the browser wars. I suspect a combination of better design and(just sour grapes - do it differently just because). Microsoft largely ignored the standards, in their mind they were the only browser and were the standard.

So IE just sat there with a slow release cycle and no desire to implement the standards - they had VML implemented so why bother with SVG - a paper spec when they have an actual implementation for years. Microsoft was busy trying to address all the security problems of their features first mentality with the trusted computing initiative and not making any forward progress on functionality.

So While Microsoft idled, Firefox and WebKit/Safari grew. The Standards bodies continued to work now they were a head of the browsers now, not way behind. Microsoft woke up to see its market share slipping and suddenly It's Browser wars II

Now Microsoft has a couple of problems keeping up

1) Backward compatibility - this is arguably a good thing as it keeps you from breaking old stuff, but also makes fixing older 'quirky' behavior.
2) Release cycle tied to OS - the slow release cycle compared to the opensource alternatives means their browser is always behind.
3) Standards games - It's not all Micosoft's fault - the standards bodies don't always play fair. Why does IE not have Canvas? When every other browser does? Because Apple has a patent on it. Apple's agreement with W3C is to license that patent once it becomes a standard (not just a proposal) but until canvas is an official standard, Microsoft is open to lawsuit if they implement it. But while the all the other browsers are implementing Canvas (opensource bodies don't have any cash to lose if Apple files a lawsuit ) their not pushing it through the standards commitee to make it official. This leaves Microsoft as the odd man out.

The IE team is working hard to catch back up, but the above 3 points are holding them back. Windows 7 is a decent OS so finally we have a chance of replacing all those OEM Windows XP computers still running IE 6.

Sounds to me like a lot of people are confusing not checking the default OS font size, or not setting your own (changeable) font size. Most of the comments I've seen about this type of bug also happen if you change default OS fonts - nothing to do with DPI... mrchaotica summarises it well

It's been done before, depends what you need from the library : http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/, http://www.uclibc.org/, etc (but these are clearly targetted at embedded systems).

That being said, dependency hell is the main reason Linux cannot get ahead of Windows or Mac for the masses - the abstraction layer may not be as optimisable as on Linux, but you can distribute small binaries and be _sure_ they work out of the box with no issues.

The state of course intervenes against the overall interest of pure profit, that is what it is there for. The level of state intervention is a matter of politics, and indeed you need but look at Copenhagen to see that overall business competitiveness is the cornerstone of any negotiation on absolute emissions reduction.

So there is a balance and nobody ever gets it right, they sway from overprotective "socialist state" and hard right "private enterprise and free market economy rules" according to geography, political will and geostrategy.

Euro & Japanese manufacturers are less influenced by the US fuel lobby. Explain why petrol costs way less in the US : (the answer is taxation in Europe). The taxation strategy indirectly subsidises (it's not quite a subsidy, of course, but to the end user making one fuel cheaper than the other is akin to subsidy even if the difference is the level of taxation)

Agree in part with behaviour patterns in Europe, but I've seen roads from Fort Worth & surroundings to Dallas clogged with large vehicles mostly used for a less than 20 mile daily commute...

Indirect subsidies of course, based on the fact that levels of taxation vary according to fuel type.

Diesel costs more per gallon in the UK compared to unleaded, but less per gallon in France. However you explain it, it's a subsidy of sorts.

Various theories hint at the interests of the oil lobby to continue four-stroke dominance (just look at the low mpg of most american manufacturers in general) and perceived customer comfort being the most widely used trump. High fuel efficiency does not usually provide sporty acceleration, low engine noise, and high torque at low revs.

That being said, no doubt many consumers don't care as much about that as the marketing departments of the automotive industry. In reality, noisy diesels have sold well in Europe (thanks in part to diesel fuel subsidies) and customers have bought poor performing, smaller cars for everyday use. They just don't make big margins on cars that sell for less than €8000 new. So once again striking a balance between shareholder interest (increasing profits) and global economic / ecological interest (decreasing emissions and oil reliance both by better fuel efficiency and better combustion of cleaner, more varied fuel) is an impossible mission.

Until oil prices go up, don't expect any good technology to prevail. The four stroke petrol engine will die, but not before oil costs increase.